I wish there would be a revolution in our media where we depict people as sexy in realistic ways. I am not against using sex in ad’s, I am against making impossible things sexy, because then everyone is striving to be something that is impossible.
Author: admin
My favorite kind of science is the “duh” science. Usually people make fun of it, because the published findings have titles like “Water makes you wet.” or “Hungry people like food.” Sure you can laugh, but without someone going out and doing this basic science, its impossible to move on to more complicated and advanced things. So when I read this recent studies headline “Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia?” all I could say to myself was “duh!”
Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.
The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author.
“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.
The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.
The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians, the authors argue. Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals. People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront, the authors write.
The research also sheds light on high profile cases in which anti-gay public figures are caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts. The authors write that this dynamic of inner conflict may be reflected in such examples as Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006, and Glenn Murphy, Jr., former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007.
“We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat,” says Ryan. “Homophobia is not a laughing matter. It can sometimes have tragic consequences,” Ryan says, pointing to cases such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard or the 2011 shooting of Larry King.
To explore participants’ explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in “gay” or “straight” categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or “others” flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words “gay,” “straight,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual” as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of “me” with “gay” and a slower association of “me” with “straight” indicated an implicit gay orientation.
A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.
Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” and “I felt free to be who I am.” For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: “It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian” or “My dad avoids gay men whenever possible.”
Finally, the researcher measured participants’ level of homophobia – both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt “k i _ _”. The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word “gay” for 35 milliseconds.
Across all the studies, participants with supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation, while participants from authoritarian homes revealed the most discrepancy between explicit and implicit attraction.
“In a predominately heterosexual society, ‘know thyself’ can be a challenge for many gay individuals. But in controlling and homophobic homes, embracing a minority sexual orientation can be terrifying,” explains Weinstein. These individuals risk losing the love and approval of their parents if they admit to same sex attractions, so many people deny or repress that part of themselves, she said.
In addition, participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.
“This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, ‘Why?'” says Ryan. “Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection.”
The study had several limitations, the authors write. All participants were college students, so it may be helpful in future research to test these effects in younger adolescents still living at home and in older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents and to look at attitudes as they change over time.
Other contributors to the paper include Cody DeHaan and Nicole Legate from the University of Rochester, Andrew Przybylski from the University of Essex, and William Ryan from the University of California in Santa Barbara. (via)
Lets not beat around the bush here, Rick Santorum is the definition of a Bigot. It’s clear as the nose on your face. He hates people based on what they are, not how they act. Now he has taken it a step further, and wants to actively work to hurt people he is bigoted against.
There are 18,000 married gay and lesbian couples in California and at least 131,000 nationwide according to the 2010 census, conducted before New York state legalized same-sex marriage in July.
Rick Santorum says he’ll try to unmarry all of them if he’s elected president.
Once the U.S. Constitution is amended to prohibit same-gender marriages, “their marriage would be invalid,” the former Pennsylvania senator said Dec. 30 in an NBC News interview.
“We can’t have 50 different marriage laws in this country,” he said. “You have to have one marriage law.”
(via)
What the fuck…
If you can overlook the fact that he wants to remove from women the right to control their own bodies, and the fact that he thinks we would be better off living in a theocracy, he thinks wanting to everyone to go to school makes you a snob, and that he is ok with abortion for his own wife, but not for anyone else, or the fact that he things being gay is the same thing as bestiality, you are still left with the fact that this fucker wants to Un-Marry people. He wants to take happily married gay couples, and split them up. These are his family values. This is his vision of the future. This man is unqualified to be president on any measure you can imagine.
He also thinks Kennedy was a chump for assuring the public that his Catholic views wouldn’t lead his policy…
WASHINGTON – Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday that he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, adding that he was sickened by John F. Kennedy’s assurances to Baptist ministers 52 years ago that he would not impose his Catholic faith on them.
“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square.”(via)
Not only is this foolish, do we really want to live in a theocracy? But it shows that this man has very little understanding of history, or the American Constitution. The only way to maintain freedom of religion in this country is to maintain freedom FROM religion. Look at any political state that instates an “official” religion. They either become barbaric theocracies (Iran, Israel, Palestine, etc etc), or the public by and large become atheist (most of Europe). And you know why most of Europe is now atheist? Because they remember the dark ages, the last time theocracy ran the world. I am all for people becoming atheists, but not if it means we have to have a second dark age.
The sad part about this is that Santorum actually thinks these things, and that a large number of Americans do to.
Categories
The Science Of Love
The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.
There are some who claim that science ruins the mystical excitement of this world. They claim that once you reduce everything down to atoms, and physics, and math that you have lost some essential wonder or glory or excitement. I fully reject this notion, I feel like an piece of art is even more enjoyable if you understand the chemical process of the paint, of the molecular structure of the stone. I feel that knowing more about emotions, like love, allows you to more fully appreciate the awesome grandeur of the human experience.
This video is a perfect example of that. These people are taking the ultimate in human emotion, love, and having it “reduced” to a number. Having it “diminished” to a series of electrical impulses in the brain. And far from being reduced by the process they are uplifted and enriched. Knowing that love is a series of chemical reactions in their brain, that can be reduced to a “score” did nothing to limit the joy these people felt.
In fact I would make the argument that now these people know that love is not something ephemeral, never to be understood. They know that love is real, that they can have it, and that it can exist, that is can even be measured. I think each person left that office with a sense of hope and wonder and awe. They are marveling at their own minds, and I am sure upon reflection marveling at the process that created their minds.
I love this video.
You know I really didn’t like “Princess Diaries”, but after seeing “Love and Other Drugs” and this, I am really starting to like Anne Hathaway.
With Rick Santorum once again “surging” (headline writers have to understand the pun they are making right…right?!) it looks like the republicans are going to, once again, drag out the old culture war shit. If you can’t win on the strength of your ideas,
I am so tired of bigoted homophobes making any of the following idiotic statements:
“My imaginary friend says two boys can’t get married”
“Two girls getting hitched will ruin my marriage”
“My imaginary friend wrote a book, it says two boys kissing is wrong”
Its even worse when they start saying things like this:
“We should make it illegal for two adults who love each other to get tax breaks for getting married because they both happen to be boys”
“Two girls who love each other can’t visit each other in the hospital even if one is dying”
“Two boys who love each other can’t adopt a baby that no one (including other people in our church) wants”
If you ask them WHY any of the previous statements should be true, they refer you to the first three. So basically the republicans have no good reason why gay people shouldn’t have all the rights as straight people. Not a single logical reason, not a single legal reasons, not a single good reason. They are simply bigots, pure and simple. In much the same way that we see racism as patently stupid, we will see homophobia one day. These people are going to go down as the villains of history. If only they could see this now, it would solve us all a lot of trouble.
In what seems like an unending serious of WTF moments in our nation, a bunch of Catholics are upset because they are going to be forced to cover birth control in health care they give their employees To be clear, Churches are exempt, but Catholic charities, hospitals, etc. will have to offer the coverage.
Obama is taking is on the chin from these people.
The president’s tone was polite but not contrite, a person briefed on the calls told POLITICO: He explained that while his health care law exempted Catholic churches from the requirement, he wouldn’t carve out other Catholic institutions even though the Vatican views artificial birth control as contrary to the will of God.
Aides say Obama’s move, which has sparked thunderous denunciations as he prepares to address the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, was motivated by personal conviction and his long-held belief that all health plans need to provide birth control to women.(via)
If I am an atheist and work at a catholic hospital I can’t get birth control covered under my health care plan, because some guy in Rome says its against his imaginary friends rules? Even if I am a Protestant, a Jew, or Hindu; because Rome says no birth control doesn’t get covered. I applaud Obama for standing up for the rights of these workers. Just because you work for a Catholic doesn’t mean you have to do every incomprehensible thing their leader says.
Just to get an idea of how silly this whole thing is. These are the same people who waited hundreds of years to admit the earth goes around the sun long after an overwhelming amount of evidence. They almost put a man to death for saying the same, and their main justification for these decisions, God told us to. Are these really the kind of people we should let help us decide important things?
I am not alone it seems, in fact a majority of Catholics themselves think that the catholic church should cover birth control.
A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.
Key breakdowns
58% of all Catholics agree employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception. That slides down to 52% for Catholic voters, 50% for white Catholics.
61% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say employer plans should cover contraception.
50%of white mainline Protestants want the coverage. However, for evangelical Protestants, that drops to 38%.And perhaps of greater note among election-watchers:
Women are significantly more likely than men to agree that employers should be required to provide health care plans that cover contraception (62% vs. 47% respectively).
A second poll, also released today from Public Policy Polling, has similar findings. This poll, conducted at the request of Planned Parenthood, finds
…a majority of voters, including a majority of Catholics, don’t believe Catholic hospitals and universities should be exempted from providing the benefit.
…Independent voters support this benefit by a 55/36 margin; in fact, a majority of voters in every racial, age and religious category that we track express support. In particular, a 53 percent majority of Catholic voters, who were oversampled as part of this poll, favor the benefit, including fully 62 percent of Catholics who identify themselves as independents.(via)
In fact 98% of Catholics ALREADY have used birth control, so of course they want it covered under their insurance plan.
Why should the opinion of Catholics merit any consideration in this decision? There have been a million crazy ideas over the eons, from the idea that humors are what made you sick (and must be balanced with mercury), to the one that an invisible friend doesn’t want you to be on the pill. We wouldn’t allow someone who thinks the earth is flat to attend our geography convention, why do we let Catholics help us decide what gets covered under our health care?
I am glad Obama stood up to these folks, maybe there is hope yet for this nation.
While I’m not the biggest fan of Penn Jillette, he breaks it down pretty good here.
I have been increasingly frustrated by the right wing “pro-life” religious forces in this country. I understand their imaginary friend wrote a book and that book tells them a bunch of nonsense. I am a firm supporter of their right to think any crazy idea they want. In fact our country was founded on their right to believe that nonsense. Heck, I would even go so far as to fight for their right to believe that foolishness. I think its the American thing to do, fight for everyone’s right to believe anything they want.
However when your imaginary friend tells you to spend your life trying to deny funding to organizations who provide abortions, you are not being American. This country was founded on the freedom FROM religion as much as the freedom of religion. That means you are free to NOT get abortions, you are free NOT to give your money to cancer research, but when you actively work to de-fund these things for others you are imposing your religious views on people who may not share them. Its no different than a Catholic telling you that you are legally prohibited from eating meat on Fridays. It’s not how this country is supposed to work.
Cancer kills roughly half a million men and women every year in this country. There have been roughly 50 million abortions provided legally in this country since 1973, which works out to roughly 1.2 million per year. Roughly 5%-20% of that number were because of risk of health to the fetus or the mother.
Fighting against groups like Planned Parenthood isn’t “pro-life.” If you are really “pro-life” You would also care about the 1 in 2 people who will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and the 500,000+ of them that die from it every year. I would hope that the “promotion of life” doesn’t end once the baby is born. As such pro-lifers have just as much responsibility to fund cancer diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and research as you do fight abortion providers. All of which are done at places like Planned Parenthood.
It’s a pity that people are unable to understand complex and nuanced issues. They think Planned Parenthood = abortion. Their imaginary friend told them abortion is bad, so they hate Planned Parenthood. The reality of the situation is much more complex. Planned Parenthood also provides birth control (can’t have an abortion if you don’t get pregnant), breast cancer screening, STD tests (HPV causes cervical cancer), and a whole host of other treatments that save lives.
I am not sure one bolsters their “pro-life” credentials by keeping much needed and life saving treatments out of the hands of men and women. It boggles my mind that the major political party in this country that is linked to the pro-life movement, is also the one against HPV vaccines, universal health care, public funding of birth control, and sex education.
What further boggles my mind is that the inspiration for this stance is based on the ramblings of bronze age goat herders that was translated over and over again before undergoing 2000 years of politically based revision, translated a couple more times, and finally spoon fed by the powerful to the weak. We are talking about people who think that human beings can rise from the dead and that virgins can give birth, these are not the kind of people who we should be taking advice from!
The “pro-life” religious right should be regulated to the fringe of this discussion, instead they seem to be at its center. We have a group with a tenuous grip on reality, the constitution, and science trying to dictate what women should do with their own bodies. Any way you slice it they don’t appear to be up to the task of making that decision.
Mayor Cory Booker, in an elegant and forceful way, says exactly why human rights shouldn’t be put up to a vote. There have been moments in America’s history when just about any group’s rights would have been taken away if put to a popular vote. Irish immigrants, Japanese immigrants, Catholics, women, blacks, interracial couples, and now queer folk, the list of people who’s rights would have been taken away if put to a vote is long. Our history is basically the history of each of these groups fighting for equal rights.
The daily show really sums it up perfectly.
There are so many people in this country that fought tooth and nail to get the rights that are supposedly given to all. And after that long hard struggle so many of them seemed to be perfectly happy to turn around and ignore other groups fighting a similar fight.
Gay rights are not just for gay people, they reflect on us as a nation. Until every citizen has the same full legal rights, none of us are really living up to our potential as a nation. Thanks Mayor Booker for laying it out so clearly.